Sunday, November 09, 2014

On Chucktoddery

...Then
there are the numerous instances of GOP implacability. Todd reminds us
that when Obama praised Republican Marco Rubio’s tax-credit proposal,
Rubio had to go on talk radio the next day to appease Republican foot
soldiers riled up by the president’s seal of approval; that Obama once
invited GOP-ers to a White House screening of Spielberg’s Lincoln,
and no one showed up; that even after furious courting by the
president, not a single Republican voted for a healthcare reform bill
modeled after a Republican governor’s plan.
But far too often,
Todd falls back on lazy, a-pox-on-both-houses thinking. He lambasts the
GOP for its obduracy but upbraids Obama for not trying harder to win
Republicans over anyway—this despite Todd’s own observation that
Republicans had “perfected” the strategy of total obstruction, and that
Republicans had come to see opposing Obama as a simple matter of
“self-interest...”